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Updated: May 7, 2025
The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of rain.... Section 1
The present rainfall would be wholly inadequate for agriculture, even if it were advantageously distributed over the lowlands, while in fact the greater portion is poured out on the heights in sudden and violent thundershowers called "cloud-bursts," the waters of which are fruitlessly swallowed up in sandy gulches and deltas a few minutes after their first boisterous appearance.
During the whole of that day we toiled, riding as hard as we could over the almost trackless canyon floor; trailing through deep sand; climbing over masses of boulders that freshets or cloud-bursts had. piled between the walls; forcing our way through dense willows; scratched by thickets of mesquites. Again and again in the walls were seen cliff-dwellings and corn storage houses.
But the herd refused to be soothed, and round and round it circled; not once would it lie down. The moon gleamed almost brazen, showing the cruel scars, the trenches torn by cloud-bursts, the lines wrought by the long, patient waiting of the earth for the lifting of the wrath of God. Imperishable grief was writ on the land as on a human face.
It was the world of his soul's origin a place of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts.
Men who have attempted to cross it at mid-day have been known to fall dead, and birds flying across have been killed by the fierce heat. Cloud-bursts occur occasionally on the adjoining mountains, when torrents pour down the declivities, filling the canyons with streams of water sometimes many feet deep, which sweep everything before them. A cloud-burst may change the whole face of the mountain.
All through that wretched summer, scorching drought alternating with cloud-bursts vied with each other in blasting the hopes of the farmers, and premature frost destroyed the few remaining stalks of corn, so that when the winter snows came, gaunt famine stared our family fiercely in the face.
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